When chaos touches your life, pay attention. For years, I've been working towards a real-life application for chaos mathematics. You know, this is the wild area (of applied math) that quantifies highly uncertain and unpredictable areas of life...and basically has no practical applications. One of the postulates of the theory is that very tiny events, if they occur near a larger unstable situation, can have huge consequences. Because of the hair-trigger sensitivity, there is no way to predict whether the tiny event will have a positive effect, a negative one, or none at all. The particular outcome depends on the roll of the dice. But in the aggregate, chaotic events do have predictable behaviors. And in the cosmic scheme of things (this theory was developed, after all, at UC Santa Cruz in the '70s), the behavior could be quantified. Which is great if you're running simulations of something in a computer about a billion times...but it doesn't help much day to day. Until now. Take the theory and run it backwards: for every Big Thing that goes on in life, there was a little thing nearby that was unpredictable, and somehow triggered the big one. Big stuff never happens on its own. Even if the situation has been building for a long time, the Big Change really is caused by the otherwise insignificant little thingie. Apply this knowledge: any time something a little weird happens in your life, particularly if it causes you to delay your actions or change your path, be on your guard for the next hour or so. If nothing happens, you're none the loser. But if this one of those critical events, you'll be on your guard to avoid potential disaster. Last night, I was able to avoid being the fourth car in a three-car accident with lots of critical injuries. By about 10 feet, i was able to miss that big ol' Ford truck as it was spinning around at 70 miles an hour. But I would have been a mile ahead of the accident, and totally not at risk had I not been delayed by a stupid insignificant chaos trigger event 15 minutes earlier. As I was walking down the aisle of the plane to get off, my briefcase inexplicably popped open and all the contents dropped out on the floor. The case has double locks and has never opened this way before. A natural reaction to this weird event is to get mad and flustered. I started paying attention. dave